Four Stanford faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

STANFORD -- Four Stanford University faculty members have been elected to
the National Academy of Sciences, the academy announced Tuesday, April 26.

Those elected from Stanford this year are:

John H. Flavell, professor of psychology;

Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics;

Lucille Shapiro, professor of development biology; and

Robert B. Wilson, professor of economics.

Their election brings the total number of Stanford faculty serving on the
academy to 105, plus an additional five affiliated with the Hoover
Institution.

The academy, a private organization of scientists and engineers
established in 1863 by an act of Congress, named 60 American members and 15
foreign associates as new members "in recognition of their distinguished and
continuing achievements in original research." Election to the academy is
considered one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve.

Flavell, an Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of
Humanities and Sciences, has been a member of the Stanford faculty since
1976. He obtained his doctorate at Clark University and first came into
national prominence as a developmental psychologist in 1963, when he
published a now-classic book on the work of Jean Piaget.

He subsequently picked up on an area raised by Piaget - "egocentric
thinking" in children - and conducted a series of studies, culminating in his
1968 book Role Taking and Communication Skills, in which he was able to show
that, while young children may be aware that others' perspective differs from
their own, they have trouble using this knowledge to tailor and monitor their
own communications appropriately.

Flavell has proposed a general model for the development of a child's
social cognition and has studied such issues as 3-year-olds' ability to
distinguish between appearance and reality and how preschoolers think about
thinking. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and holds honorary degrees from the University of Paris and the University of
Rochester

Laughlin, who is also an Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the
School of Humanities and Sciences, is recognized as one of the top theorists
in the field of condensed matter physics, the study of the physical
properties of solid materials.

Laughlin, who received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1979 and came to Stanford in 1984, provided one of the first
general theoretical explanations of the quantum Hall effect, which involves
the motion of electrons in metals or semiconductors in the presence of both
electric and magnetic fields. When cooled to very low temperatures,
electrical conductivity in one direction becomes quantized, that is, begins
to jump between different discrete values. For his explanation of this and
related effects, he was awarded the 1985 E.O. Lawrence Award for Physics, as
well as the 1986 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, the most
prestigious award in condensed matter physics in this country.

More recently, Laughlin has been working on an original theory to explain
the newly discovered high temperature superconductors, materials that can
conduct electricity at much higher temperatures than traditional
superconductors. Among other honors, Laughlin was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.

Shapiro, the Joseph D. Grant Professor in the School of Medicine, received
her doctorate from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She came to Stanford
in 1989 to build the medical school's new Department of Developmental
Biology, one of the few such departments in the country.

Using techniques of molecular genetics and biochemistry, Shapiro's
research contributes to one of the most basic questions of developmental
biology: How is the three-dimensional organization of a cell generated from a
one-dimensional genetic code? Shapiro was one of a small circle of
researchers to introduce and develop the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus as
a model system for development. The apparently symmetrical bacterial cell can
become polarized, gaining structures and molecules on one side that are
absent from the other. By studying this process, called unicellular
differentiation, Shapiro hopes to learn more about polarity in the more
complex cells of vertebrates, and eventually to better understand
developmental mechanisms that allow one cell to divide into two daughter
cells that differ from each other. Shapiro is also a member of the National
Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine and of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences.

Wilson is the Atholl McBean Professor of Economics at the Graduate School
of Business. His teaching and research have focused on competition and
cooperation in multi-person decisions, particularly the role of incentives
and the effects of differences in information. Among his publications are
seminal articles on risk sharing, incentives and efficient methods of
allocating resources.

An authority on competitive bidding, Wilson recently helped design an
auction system for selling radio spectrum licenses that will be used later
this year by the Federal Communications Commission. Wilson earned his
bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Harvard. He joined the Stanford
faculty in 1964. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the Econometric Society, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences and the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences.

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